Drive by Elaine Sexton Review by Walter Holland
Drive by Elaine Sexton
Grid Books
12 April 2022
96 pages
ISBN: 978-1-946830-14-2
Review by Walter Holland
Elaine Sexton is a poet who draws and sketches vibrant meditative poems. Her poems are sleekly rendered and have the quality of studied watercolors, jottings en plein air. Sexton’s poems open and close as a car window with the breezy freedom and independence of a solitary drive down a country road. Her hand with pen likes to dangle in the rush of thoughts, musings, fears, and the passing of remembered time. A minimalist at heart, sensitive and optimistic, she gives us glimmers of her personal journey already well on its way and ever aware of the limits of the body and the final destination up ahead.
“Drive”, is used as the title of this book as both noun and verb, subject and action, becoming the collection’s central metaphor. Indeed the collection begins with an envoy of sorts, a short prose poem entitled “the most beautiful thing”. The poem tells us of the poet’s great love of the car and driving her car through the accumulative beauty of the countryside, i.e. the world at large. Specifically the speaker loves to drive to the seashore, and to go there amid the visual splendor of the natural landscape. She explains that the most beautiful thing about the drive is not in the beauty of the car, nor is it the shore or the sea, nor the images she views along the way, but rather, it is the total action of the journey itself. It is in the doing, the living. Life is finite, time is fixed, and death is willed, but our imagination and our consciousness are surprisingly free to transport us at our command.
With a wonderful cascading rhetorical effect, Sexton plays with the question of what is the most beautiful thing in her jaunt to the ocean. By a kind of switch and bait, repeating one word-image in the preceding phrase and then advancing it forward to a newer one, she promises an answer. Like skipping a stone across a pond, Sexton achieves a playfully serial tone of logic that ends with a surprising circular revelation. We begin with the “car” and her driving it to the seashore, and then we move to the “beach” and then to “watercolor,” then to “water”, to “pigment”, “earth” and “sea” until finally we circle back to the “drive” itself as the true answer.
The importance here is not in the materiality of the physical world, “things” or “images” per se, but it is in action, change, movement, and the power of our intention. Consciousness and the liberated imagination are our most important modes of transport.
The metaphor of the journey, of the drive as life and freedom, personal freedom and the singular experience of the artist, is one of Sexton’s central premises as I’ve said. One feels in her writing sweeping motion and flickering visual delight. It is the “eye” as well as the “I” that are always at work. Sexton is the sole voice in these poems, ever vigilant of herself, her inner workings, thoughts, doubts, and assessments, as well as the driver of her own experience. In the course of these poems we pass outer realities along the way: life events, the death of family, disturbing observations of worldly injustice, but also the sheer pleasure of what we can see. Time is as real as those mile markers along the way, which often enough we choose to ignore or drift away from into dreams of distraction, illusory and timeless as they may seem.
These contemplations of life, time, and death and the materiality of our human existence surface again and again. Sexton frequently uses repetition in service of a circularity of thought, avoiding the stasis of imagery to present the movement of how we experience the world in a cinematic way. In the poem “Transport” we read:
………………………I don’t expect the end
………………………to be like the din of a river,
………………………a sound
………………………with no beginning.
………………………I’m certain the end is the sea.
………………………Not the sound of the sea,
………………………but the sea itself,
………………………the part that expires
………………………after it heaves. You
………………………may think the sea draws a breath
………………………and comes back, but
………………………the what of it ends
………………………in a wave. There is an end
………………………to a wave.
Sexton’s ideas on life and the body and the body and death are presented with a simple style of Zen-like clarity, like koans that lead to paradoxical thinking and mystical existential conceits. There is no after-life here. The body and its materiality is conjoined with its actions and when the material form dies so too does its meaning.
Along this drive the poet begins to lose her nerve and contemplates the danger she has invited. With windows wide open she hears inner voices, her conscience telling her conflicting things, wanderings of thoughts and observations, recriminations and frustrations, all shifting in a constant narrow “road” of singular feelings.
She continues:
………………………………………………One
………………………counts syllables,
………………………sensory signals or signposts
………………………in three languages
………………………whizzing by. Another
………………………searches the rear-view
………………………mirror, thinking out loud:
………………………watch that biker
………………………cycling too close to the car.
In a way this parallels the daily experiences of life. It is as well the experience of the poet-artist, who is ever questioning what to include in her poem or painting, the inner or the outer, the personal or the ideological and what does art truly capture or reflect of living and perception?
Beyond the metaphor of journey, Sexton draws attention to poetry, language and the imagination as all vehicles of transport that move us freely back and forth through time. In her ars poetica “Caper”, the title’s very definition, to “skip or dance about in a lively or playful way”, “a playful skipping movement,” suggests Sexton’s love of free, unbounded language.
She writes:
………………………When I am an eraser I can do
………………………………………………anything. Mistakes may be made
………………………with impunity. I write
………………………………………………as though paper will never be
………………………priceless, it crumples
………………………………………………and springs back. The invention
………………………of the pencil protects me
………………………………………………from permanency and
………………………practicality. Ideas are not
………………………………………………commitments. This jaw line
………………………may be drawn smooth, not
………………………………………………cracked, to receive a caress.
………………………I draw shade and under it
………………………………………………a neck, shoulders. I dream
………………………this to be me, that dreams
………………………………………………matter. If I can be my dream,
………………………and live it too, so can you.
Indeed, Sexton rejects a poetry of austerity, preciousness, formality or permanent rigid “commitment”. She has no abiding interest in formal, stylistic poetry that is complicated, erudite, and needlessly cumbersome. Instead she prefers the quick study, the absolute freedom of the imagination to go where it wishes and to go with individual agency. The map for her is a hinderance, as there are so many ways to get there and so much that is wonderful and yes painful to see along the way.
Elaine Sexton is the author of three previous collections of poetry including Sleuth (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2003), Causeway (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2003), and Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015). She currently teaches at the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute and lives in New York City and the North Fork of Long Island.
Walter Holland’s book reviews have appeared in Pleiades, Lambda Literary Review, and Rain Taxi. He is the author of four books of poetry, one novel, and his work has also been published in numerous fine journals and anthologies. For more information visit: www.walterhollandwriter.com
28 September 2022
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